Moving from Google Reader to WordPress.com

Even though Google Reader showed up prominently in yesterday’s SERPs for “best free RSS reader”, someone at Google has decided to end the product life of Google Reader.

It’s time to move on to a new RSS reader.

Several RSS readers managed to survive despite Google Reader’s dominance. And some new ones emerged. These tools are getting frequent mentions:

• Feedly
• NewsBlur
• RSSOwl
• Zite
• The old reader

Digg decided to build a new reader the day Google announced the end of its Reader. In some ways, that’s the silver lining. RSS readers are getting more attention than in the past years combined.

WordPress.com

This is how you can import your RSS subscriptions into WordPress.com.

First, go to Google Takeout to download your Google Reader data:

The process is fairly straightforward.

Click Download and save the zip file on your computer.

Voilà. Saved the data for future use. Who knew! I’ve got 6.5 MB of shared Google Reader articles.

WordPress.com offers an RSS reader. I don’t know if I’ll make WordPress.com my RSS Reader, but there’s one advantage. I already have a login for WordPress.com. And it’s easy to try out. This is what I did to add my RSS subscriptions (not my past shared articles!) to WordPress.com:

Click Import your subscriptions.

I used the special service: Import your Google Reader sunscriptions directly.

I allowed WordPress.com to access Google Reader.

That’s it. Done.

The challenge: so far WordPress.com isn’t in my regular flow of news sites that I visit. I use it for special photo projects, Akismet and Jetpack.